[Axiom-developer] Re: [Gcl-devel] Re: GCL on windows.

[root]

>Bill Page wrote:

> Just to be clear. MinGW/Msys is not an extension of the
> Windows operating system (like Cygwin is) but rather
> just a minimal development environment that results in
> a native Windows application. Originally there was
> just a native windows GCC compiler called MinGW. Now
> there is a rapidly growing set of utilitys and libraries
> ported from the Linux originals which makes up Msys. So
> far in my experience it is much faster than Cygwin and
> seems to be in a state of very active development where as
> Cygwin is now viewed (by some at least) as a bit "old
> fashioned". A lot of the MinGW/Msys stuff is derived by
> people with Cygwin experience.
> 
> The biggest difficulty that I see in MinGW is the lack
> of the X-windows environment which is (more or less)
> unique to Unix (and part of Cygwin). Microsoft Windows
> itself *is* a windows environment but very different
> from X-windows. So porting Unix graphical applications to
> Microsoft Windows is currently rather difficult. But their
> are some people working on methods to make this easier in
> the future.
> 
> After several tests and trials, I think MinGW/Msys (rather
> than Cygwin) is the best choice for building the Windows
> version of Axiom.

Ok. I'll defer to whatever choice you find appropriate.
The graphics portion of Axiom currently amounts to the
hypertex browser and the drawing software. The interpreter
doesn't really depend on anything since it was developed
to run on a text-only mainframe. Getting interpsys and
the algebra running is the first goal.

The windows version of Axiom used to use IBM's TexExplorer
software but that was not released. I'll cruise around the
web for some combination of tex, graphics & windows software. 
We can't be the first people to need an open-source version
of this.

Magnus has a tcl/tk front end. I believe that tcl/tk software
will run on windows. Do you know if this is true? Perhaps we
can steal the front-end as it is a stand-alone piece of
software.

Tim